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Music-making and forced migrants’ affective practices of diasporic belonging.

De Martini Ugolotti, N., 2022. Music-making and forced migrants’ affective practices of diasporic belonging. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 48 (1), 92-109.

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DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2020.1790344

Abstract

Amid the normalisation of xenophobic narratives surrounding migration, and an overarching ‘hostile environment’ regulating asylum in Britain, this paper explores music-making as a unique lens to highlight the negotiation of belonging, uncertainty and marginality amongst a group of fifty forced migrants in Bristol. Through a focus addressing the nexus between power, affect and the everyday, this paper discusses how the dehumanising processes that characterise the British asylum regime operate in and through the spaces, bodies and objects constituting its ‘ordinary’ materiality. Concurrently, this paper addresses how the entanglement of bodies, ‘things’ and sounds emerging from the co-creation of weekly music groups enabled the group participants to negotiate pleasure, expression and sociality in a context of enforced marginality and uncertainty. Consequently, this paper discusses the music-making sessions as affective practices of diasporic belonging: relationalities arising from multiple forms of displacement that enabled momentary, but productive domains of sociability, co-presence and solidarity beyond ethnic, national, gendered and religious lines. The conclusions consider the contributions of theoretical approaches enabling researchers (and potentially advocates and community organisers) to recognise the stakes and significance of forced migrants’ (in)visible forms of sociality that take place beside the discursive and institutional frames of State and humanitarian interventions.

Item Type:Article
ISSN:1369-183X
Additional Information:Funded by "Here to Play": Exploring the Role of Leisure in Forced Migrants' Negotiations of Place, Belonging and Uncertainty in Post-Brexit Bristol.
Uncontrolled Keywords:Refugees ; Forced Migration ; Music-making ; Diaspora ; Affect ; Materiality
Group:Bournemouth University Business School
ID Code:34266
Deposited By: Symplectic RT2
Deposited On:08 Jul 2020 12:29
Last Modified:14 Mar 2022 14:23

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